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Google has recently made changes to its ranking algorithms.
There are no offical words from Google but it seems that the
changes has been made to fight two phenomena that worried
Google:

1. "Google bombing"
2. selling advertising based on Google PageRank

"Google bombing" means that a lot of web pages link to the
same web page with the same link text. For example, if you
searched Google with the phrase "go to hell", the number one
result was microsoft.com because many web pages linked to
microsoft.com with that exact phrase.

With the latest Google update, searching for "go to hell" no
longer takes you to microsoft.com.

Then there are sites that sell text ads and links where the
prices are determined by the Google PageRank of the sites.
This means that you'd pay for a link to your web site
depending on the Google PageRank of the other site.

Google doesn't like it. Links are not placed because the
linked site has important content but because the linked
site has money. If many sites would sell their links, then
Google's PageRank algorithm wouldn't work.

So what has changed in Google ranking algorithms? There are
some hints:

- To stop Google bombing, Google now seems to check link
texts with the link web site. If the link text doesn't
appear in the linked site, then the link is ignored or
degraded.

- To stop PageRank monetization, Google seems to put lower
value to link texts if the linked pages don't have a high
PageRank.

If all the girls lived up in trees, what a good climber johnnie would be.

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by johnniebry:
Google now seems to check link
texts with the link web site. If the link text doesn't
appear in the linked site, then the link is ignored or
degraded.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Does this effectively reduce the relevance of every affiliate link to a CJ, LinkShare, or Bfast merchant?

For example, all of my affiliate links to CJ merchants are of the form http://www.qksrv.net/click-.... There is no text at qksrv.net that would match the text in my affiliate link.

Does the googlebot follow through to the re-directed page (i.e. the merchant) and look for the matching text at the re-directed page? (I'm assuming it follows through.)

I kind of get the feeling that google ignores the redirects altogether but perhaps I'm wrong. I just checked www.qksrv.net and it's PR6 even though there must be a few million links to it... maybe it's just because there's no actual content. Wait, now that I think of it, if the bots did follow the links then we'd be getting a ton of click throughs whenever a bot came around to our sites so I guess the bots know better then to follow it (or cj knows better then to count it).

Google does follow redirects. Depending on how they are set up - ie: it follows 302s. I've said in this forum several times that merchants are getting a very strong search engine boost via their affiliate programs.